Life’s quite different than it was just a few months ago. For so many of us, we’ve shifted to working remotely. For others, that is not possible until we can get back to safely working from our place of business. Everything that we are used to doing in person – seeing the doctor, shopping for groceries, celebrating birthdays, seeing families and friends, saying goodbye to loved ones – we have had to adapt to doing digitally, at least for now, until we can do them in person again. And during these unprecedented times, we have seen the inequities in access to healthcare, jobs, education, and social justice, among other things, become even more pervasive.
Cisco is committed to harnessing technology for good to step up to the world’s biggest challenges and create new possibilities for tomorrow. Supporting our customers and communities is a core value of Cisco. We’ve helped them build resiliency through difficult economic times, industry disruptions, times of intense growth, and prosperity. And now, during this COVID-19 pandemic and a landscape of increasing injustice and intolerance, we will continue to strive to build an inclusive future for all.
We are living in a world of shifting conditions where we lack predictability. The COVID-19 pandemic has required us to focus on what it takes to build strong and resilient communities and solutions for new challenges. These new challenges require a different mindset, and Cisco is committing our best resources – our people and technology – to address them.
Our teams have worked tirelessly to implement and scale solutions for our customers and partners who have moved, primarily, to work-from-home environments. The reliance on video calls, VPN, mobile connectivity, and security for an unparalleled number of remote workers has never been greater, nor has the need for the rapid expansion of remote business capabilities without sacrificing security and privacy. And, the pivot from an IT-managed carpeted space, to highly distributed SP-enabled home-office infrastructure has also moved at an unprecedented pace.
Most recently, Cisco has partnered with our healthcare customers to meet the rapidly changing demands of this crisis. We’ve donated trials of Webex, Intersight, and Workload Optimizer to medical teams to support remote connectivity and telemedicine. We’ve customized solutions to support the rapid ramp up of ICUs, temporary clinics, and COVID test sites. We’ve prioritized integrations with EPIC, Cerner, and other medical application systems in order to accelerate our customers’ ability to treat patients remotely. We’re working with partners like Medical Informatics Corp. to provide seamless medical device integration, rapid capacity expansions, and remote access to medical data. Keeping healthcare workers and patients safe is a top priority, and we’re working hand-in-hand with our customers to ensure we meet their needs.
For our customers who manage factories, distribution warehouses, and other facilities that require personnel to be onsite, we’ve provided solutions that will help to ensure employee safety, while allowing them to meet their continued productivity demands and adapt to a rapidly changing geopolitical environment. Specifically, we’re expanding our wireless and IoT portfolio to support proximity monitoring and tracing, and contactless customer service in the campus and non-carpeted spaces. We’re doubling down on security and automation with a focus on industrial cybersecurity and factory automation networks to enable the onshoring and migration of new manufacturing. Our customers and partners are counting on Cisco to help shape their business resiliency and rebound plans.
We are also working with prominent university labs and researchers to develop new technologies for privacy-centric contact tracing and most importantly, new ways to research, combat, and prevent COVID-19. We have also called for new proposals to explore and develop advances in pandemic science and technology. We have aspirations to leverage technology to eliminate human bias in access to healthcare where care is delivered based on need and not your economic status or the color of your skin. We are exploring ways in which we can create a new future for our healthcare system that leverages modern technology to improve patient protection and outcomes, increase speed and access to care, and decrease the high cost of care that burdens the system.
COVID-19 has required rapid problem-solving, creativity, and working collaboratively to address this world of shifting conditions. We collectively have to stand up to injustice and intolerance and also take action to address it. I am honored to be a part of a company that is committed to working towards creating an inclusive future for all.
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